Sympathy between humans (2 page)

 

 

“Lieutenant Prewitt is looking for you,â€

 

 

“This is a different look for you,â€

 

 

After eight uninterrupted hours of sleep at home,
I woke up in my warm, stifling bedroom wanting several things all at once: ice water; a hot, hot shower; and some kind of food I couldn’t quite identify. I satisfied the first two needs first, lingering in the shower. It was amazing how much better my ear felt already. It wasn’t even sore. It just had that pleasant, empty heaviness that sometimes replaces pain, the way your head feels after a particularly nasty headache rolls out, letting you free of its grip at last.

 

 

Dressed in a pair of cutoffs and a tank shirt against the hot weather, I went into the kitchen and looked over the lightly stocked refrigerator and cupboards. Nothing appealed to me. Whatever this odd craving was, it wasn’t the usual impulse-eating suspects: caffeine, sugar, salt, or red meat. I went out the back entryway, into the yard.

 

 

Last night’s storm had left the skies clean, with just a few white clouds left over in the west. The sun was high in the sky, but the overhanging elms filtered out all but a few of its rays. My neighbor’s underfed Siamese cat prowled through the overgrown grass of our narrow, untended backyard, stopped, assessed me as no threat, and went on. I, also, went on, to the basement door and down into the cobwebbed dimness.

 

 

Down here was what Shiloh called the “Armageddon food,â€

 

 

“I feel really bad,â€

 

 

Young. I was young.
I was too young to remember much of anything.

 

 

That was the refrain I was getting from the Hennessy children, and to be fair, it was probably true. I was overdue for an adult perspective on the Hennessy situation, and with Hugh incapacitated and his wife dead, there wasn’t one.

 

 

Hugh Hennessy, though, wasn’t just any citizen. He was a successful writer. At least some of the details of his life must have been chronicled, and would be available to me. For that, I needed the University of Minnesota library.

 

 

I started with a Web search on Hugh’s name. It told me that he had written three books, with more than a few years between publication of each. All three were considered to be largely semiautobiographical. The first,
Twilight,
was an indictment of his parents’ slowly withering marriage in suburban Atlanta. The second,
The Channel,
was a story about his ancestors in New Orleans, named for the Irish Channel section of that city.
The Channel
was the book that had sounded vaguely familiar to me when Marlinchen had mentioned it, and now I understood why; it had been his most popular work, praised by many critics as warm without being sentimental, unflinching about American prejudice without resorting to self-pity.

 

 

Hennessy’s third book,
A Rainbow at Night,
was widely perceived as a fictionalization of the Hennessy marriage, which had ended with the death of Hennessy’s wife at age 31. The title came from the protagonist’s thought, verbalized close to the end of the book, that he had once had “a dream of love that was beautiful but ultimately impossible, like a rainbow at night.â€

 

 

My first day back
on daytime shifts was about as unproductive as I’d expected. I reported for work with shadows under my eyes and helped my body clock to readjust with a lot of coffee. On my lunch break, I went to Family Services and made the required minors-at-risk report on the Hennessys. I didn’t allow myself to feel as though I was letting Marlinchen down. The system was there to help kids like her; my report was part of that.

 

 

The most significant job of the day was a robbery. I took the call and interviewed witnesses. The details were familiar: two young white guys with nylon-stocking masks taking down a convenience store at gunpoint, quite similar to the robbery I’d investigated last week.
We love patterns,
I imagined telling the anonymous young gunmen, consolidating the two reports into one folder.
Don’t quit while you’re ahead; just keep on doing it like you’re doing it. We’ll meet someday.

 

 

My phone rang, and I picked it up with my mind still half on the young robbers.

 

 

“Ms. Pribek?â€

 

 

Last year,
after his accident in Blue Earth, my husband had been missing for seven days. I’d exhausted my professional knowledge of missing-persons work in looking for him. I’d traveled and spoken to his family. Furthermore, as his wife, I’d had full access to Shiloh’s accounts, his papers, his home. None of it had made any difference. It was as if he’d simply been erased.

 

 

With Aidan Hennessy, I was in the opposite situation. He should have been easy as hell to find. Aidan was an underage runaway, not a fugitive. The longer he spent on the road, the more likely it should have been that he’d be arrested for vagrancy or petty theft. He simply shouldn’t have been this hard to find.

 

 

Yet I’d spent three days working the various law-enforcement databases I had access to, and none of it was helping. Deputy Fredericks had e-mailed me Aidan’s last school-yearbook photo, but that didn’t count as an advance. Unless Aidan Hennessy fell into a drainage canal someplace near where I just happened to be, I didn’t think I was going to find him.

 

 

It was that frustration that drove me backward, on my next day off, to the elementary school where all the Hennessy children had received their early education, and which Donal still attended.

 

 

Marlinchen had mentioned her fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Hansen, in a brief phone conversation we’d had earlier that morning. Hansen had taught both Marlinchen and Aidan, although not in the same year, because Aidan had been held back to repeat the fourth grade. By my calculations, that made her the last teacher in Minnesota to be familiar with Aidan Hennessy, and the one most likely to remember him.

 

 

The school didn’t look impressive, given the relative wealth of the neighborhood it was in. It was an assortment of one-story redbrick buildings. Children swarmed around the play structures in the yard; it was their lunch recess.

 

 

On her lunch break, Mrs. Hansen was grading papers in her classroom. I stepped inside and immediately felt like a giantess as I walked up through the low desks toward the larger one where Mrs. Hansen sat. She was full-breasted for a woman otherwise slightly built— I gauged her at about five-one— and wore glasses on a gold chain over her off-white shell sweater. Her blond hair was shoulder-length, cut in a flattering way close around the face. Only by looking closely could you see she was nearing 50.

 

 

“Can I help you?â€

 

 

Marlinchen was the last person
I should have come off second best to in an interview situation; she was just a kid. But she outclassed me; that was the problem. For all that I wore the authority of a county detective, I was still keenly aware of my rough edges when the job took me into the graceful homes and worlds of middle- and upper-class citizens, especially those like Marlinchen, who wore the intellect she’d inherited from her father as comfortably as she might have worn family jewels. She was the princess, in her shabby-elegant old castle on a shining lake, and I, a civil servant, was the commoner, feeling obligated to help her for reasons I didn’t fully understand.